Illuminations

"I first read them when I was studying English, and they completely blew me away. The reason that they mattered so much to me then – and still matter to me now – is that I’ve never read philosophy that was so personal, and completely engaged with the experience of thinking and looking at people and at art. The essays that matter most to me are the one on [collector and historian] Edward Fuchs, and another called “Unpacking my Library” where he records the experience of unpacking crates of books that have been put away for several years. As he unpacks he talks about where he bought them, the experience of having them and what they feel like in the hand. So it’s a meditation on history, a meditation on philosophy, a meditation on collecting and an autobiography as well. It was the idea that you could write in an engaged way about diverse things that has remained incredibly important to me. Yes, he was a Jewish Marxist philosopher. But it’s difficult to think of a less dry Marxist. He is completely besotted by the world of things and commodities – how things get made, how they get turned into art, and how they get traded, collected and dispersed. He’s very good on all those different things. He can also write about cities beautifully. Another of his books, Passagenwerk [ The Arcades Project ], is the greatest book about Paris in the 19th century that there is. But he’s also completely brilliant on toys, on photographs and on books. What I absolutely love about him is the feeling of someone who cares about the world of things, and how things work with people – but he’s also a philosopher, which is very unusual. My take on it is that there is still something extraordinary about art which comes out of an encounter between a person and a material. The further you get away from that, the more you get into something which is commodified and reduced to a series of other people’s interactions with it. There is something extraordinary which is lost. But here I am. I’m sitting next to my [potter’s] wheel while I’m talking to you. No. I’ve got fantastic assistants working for me. But everything here, I make. People help me, but that’s different from the other way of making contemporary art."